Fans pick 100 books like Courtesies of the Heart

The B-25 of one Wilson brother was lost off New Guinea. This book is about the location and recovery of the remains of 22 men lost with a B-24 in New Guinea in 1944. Fascinating but tedious forensic work identified all 22 men.

Part I tells about bird hunters in Papua New Guinea finding remains of a large plane in 1980 and about Bruce Hoy, the first curator of the Aviation Maritime and War Branch of the National Museum and Art Gallery of Papua New Guinea, who was obsessed with finding the remains of about 350 aircraft downed there between 1942 and 1945. A team, including the two bird hunters, located and identified the B-24, mapping out an area to begin identifying the human remains and artifacts with X-numbers. The pilot was from Iowa.

This book is historically valuable but also a poignant human story.

Bones of My Grandfather is a grandson’s search for answers to the astonishing saga of a soldier lost in brutal fighting on a remote atoll in the Pacific and the hole that loss left in his family and their descendants. His loss was in the headlines because his family was well-known and wealthy, but even that didn't help them bring home his remains.

Woven among details of the battle are pockets of family history, the politics of finding and identifying remains, discussion of the War Graves Registration Service, amphibious warfare history, and even the politics of awarding war medals, the Medal of Honor had been denied to Bonnyman in 1944, but awarded to him two years later.

This is not only the story of a young American serving in WWII, it's a family story about what happens when that MIA or KIA telegram arrives. And how it permeates through the family when the family member is never found and the family is left in limbo, dealing with an ambiguous loss and unresolved grief that even affects more generations.

Because my Grandma Leora lost three sons during WWII, I can relate to the not knowing, as for one of the brothers, only God knows where his remains lie today.

It is encouraging to read about the author's trips to Europe and to learn how much the Dutch revere the young Americans who helped liberate their homeland. They publicly remember anniversaries and welcome visiting Americans, especially those hunting for answers.

This family history and historical journey, aiming for closure by one family, is a real American treasure.

Howard Snyder’s B-17 and crew were part of the 8th Air Force, stationed in England. They were shot down in February of 1944 on the French/Belgium border. Two members of the crew of 10 were killed in the plane, some were rescued and in hiding, and some were captured.

The author, Howard Snyder’s son, not only researched what happened to his father, but also the rest of the crew. He contacted a former German pilot who shot down the Susan Ruth.

Howard Snyder was kept hidden by brave Belgians. Paul Delahaye was 13 years old when the Americans forced out the Germans. Delahaye made it his mission to make sure the Americans were never forgotten, building memorials and starting museums. Steve Snyder kept in touch with his father’s rescuers, visiting Belgium and meeting Paul Delahaye.

A remarkable story.

I turn to this book to remind myself how good economic history should be written: by foregrounding the political stakes and by angling for compelling prose. In Tooze’s telling, when Nazi ideological rage met the grim realities of a global Depression, the result was the lethal gamble to conquer Germany’s way out of isolation.

It’s so instructive to watch Tooze adroitly move between narrative registers—absorbing, emphatic, mordant, even humorous—as he tackles this hair-raising topic. The thorniest subjects—foreign exchange controls and machine tools, forced labor, and racial war—come to life to awesome and awful effect.

The coming of the Third Reich in 1933 left Klemperer, a cash-strapped Jewish scholar, without his teaching job in a German university, but somehow sheltered from the worst excesses of Nazism due to his marriage to an “Aryan” German woman. His diaries are a window to the daily life of a childless middle-aged couple that observes world-shaking events from close proximity, while worrying about debts and the high costs of keeping the family car, Klemperer's most cherished possession. 

This is not a full biography – the biography Steinert wrote later in her career is not available in English – but many of the ideas in Steinert’s biography can also be found in this earlier work, which has faded into posterity slightly but can be read with great profit. Here, Steinert is concerned to give texture to a hitherto often two-dimensional image of German society and its attitudes to Hitler’s War. The result is an interesting, differentiated account of public opinion in Nazi Germany. In many respects, it was pioneering and opened up questions surrounding the relationship between state and society that other historians went on to explore further in the 1980s. Steinert’s Francophone background, and perhaps the fact that she was a female writer working in a profession that was then very male-dominated, probably account for the fact that her work is less well-known in the English-speaking world… show more.

This crucial book was originally published by Putnam’s, New York, in 1941. 

Riess admitted in his autobiography (which exists only in German) that the book was largely a compilation of material from various sources, much of it handed to him personally by Robert Vansittart, the head of British Intelligence at the time. Large portions of the book were in fact written by Heinrich Pfeifer, and supplied to British Intelligence, part of it on Pfeifer’s two trips to London, and part passed across via Vansittart’s agent Walker in Lucerne.

Riess was a Jewish refugee from Germany who was trusted by Vansittart to aid him in helping to persuade the American public to enter the War against Germany. The book is one of the most astonishing books of its kind ever written, full of breathtaking revelations. It deserves to be widely known and to be a classic text for historical studies.

Its… show more.

I must admit I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book; it was too dry, too academic, and too detail-obsessed. To be honest, I found it to be all those things, and yet it was absorbing!

I came to the conclusion that I really liked it because I was either a) a geek or b) quite sad, and both are true. Anyway, what I discovered was that I liked this book exactly because it was dry and detailed.

It told me a story I hadn’t heard before and one that opened my eyes and my thinking to a hugely important aspect of the air war–the world of guns and those who crewed them, who, increasingly as the war went on, were schoolchildren. 

There are dozens of excellent books about Germany and Germans in the wake of defeat – I could mention Giles MacDonogh’s After the Reich, or R.M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane – but Douglas Botting’s book is by far the most engaging history of the subject that I’ve ever read. It was written in the 1980s, so it is not quite as up-to-date as the more recent histories, but what it lacks in cutting-edge research it more than makes up for in narrative immediacy. It is impossible not to be moved by Botting’s descriptions of postwar chaos, of orphans hiding in the ruins, of lawlessness, starvation, desperation and retribution. An absolute classic.